Development
Taking Rome by storm, a Codemotion adventure
Mailjet took over Codemotion Rome 2015. From ancient computers to funky drones and Web API, see what our developer evangelists got up to in Italy.
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It was a fairly inauspicious start to my journey, flying into Rome Fiumicino airport only to find there were no trains to the city due a power cut. I’m sure they weren’t entirely blaming the construction team at the station, but it was after an eerie walk through the dark I managed to find a taxi and begin the complicated task of bargaining over a fair… there are some disadvantages to being a tourist, not least everyone thinks you are made of gold.
After a bumpy journey to a suburb in Rome, I finally made it to the AirBnB and met up with my partner in crime for the weekend, Superstar Evangelist Shubham. We packed as many goodies as we could, charged our laptops, grabbed a pizza (when in Rome…) and an early night.
Codemotion Rome was taking place at Roma Tre University Engineering Department, which was considerably bigger than it looked on the outside, meaning there were enough talks on different tracks to keep the 2000 attendees on their toes - not least having to use a map to find your way around, if you’ve got a memory like mine.
We walked down the ‘Startup Alleys’ of companies exhibiting and set up our Mailjet booth, making sure to keep our supplies of Mailjet Mints™ topped up for attendees along with our selection of swag.
In addition to the many talks, there was also a few breakout areas with a host of cool stuff:
An Indie Game Development collection was busiest when someone pulled an Oculus Rift out - the rumours that overdoing it on your first try can give you motion sickness didn’t put people off and there was a huge queue for what is probably going to be awesome technology (hurry up and release it already!).
There was also a Maker Faire, with a collection of 3-D printers, drones and other cool tech.
[I mean seriously, how cool is that drone?]
Not to be outdone by a flying contraption, I found this old friend in the corner - anyone else get a pang of nostalgia?
We had some great chats with students, developers and a couple of Mailjet customers in between talks ranging from Best Practises in Open Source through ‘The Dark Side of Malware analysis’ all the way to ‘Hacking the Front End’.
Although my Italian is, err, a little limited (quite a few talks were in Italian), I heard good things and especially on the busy Friday, things were buzzing.
There were sessions on cloud technologies, open source and containers, the meteoric rise of Docker shows no signs of abating as developers look to make building and shipping code quicker, more consistent and more convenient.
It was two days of great talks, great people, almost great weather and a treat for anyone with a passion for technology. To top it off, Rome is a great city, making it easy to convince yourself to stay for ‘just one more day’. The next Codemotion is taking place in Berlin - see you all there ?
